This summer the Linde Group will launch a new “BeeZero” car sharing programme in Munich, Germany.

This on its own would not be special at all – except in this case BeeZero will be relying on hydrogen fuel cell cars – the first time the tech has been used in car sharing.

As a core component of the project, Hyundai will deliver 50ix35 Fuel Cells, so anyone in Munich will get chance to try hydrogen cars and be “totally blown away” by electric drive performance and up to 600 km (370 miles) range on a single tank.

Currently there are more than 250 Hyundai ix35 Fuel Cell SUVs on European roads in 13 countries.

BeeZero will be run on a zone-based model in Munich’s city centre, as well as in the areas of Schwabing, Haidhausen, Au and Glockenbachviertel.

The BeeZero car sharing service will be run on a zone-based model. The fleet of fifty ix35 Fuel Cell cars will be available in Munich’s city centre and also in the areas of Schwabing, Haidhausen, Au and Glockenbachviertel. As with conventional car sharing services, the cars can be easily booked online or via a smartphone app.

The Hyundai ix35 Fuel Cell can travel about 600 kilometres on a single tank, making it ideal for longer journeys too, to the Bavarian lakes or the mountains for example, and not just for short trips in the city. Hydrogen fuel for BeeZero is sourced from sustainable production processes, making it completely carbon neutral.”

“The new BeeZero car sharing offer is pioneering sustainable mobility. Featuring the Hyundai ix35 Fuel Cell, BeeZero will not only be the first car sharing service using hydrogen-powered zero-emission cars, but will also offer comfortable and reliable transportation for the public’s everyday needs.”

Dr Christian Bruch, member of the Executive Board of Linde AG said:

“We expect to gain valuable information from day-to-day fleet operations which we will use to further develop our hydrogen technologies and to help expand the hydrogen infrastructure. BeeZero synergises two mobility trends that are gaining a lot of ground at the moment -car sharing and zero emissions -and will bring the benefits of fuel cell technology to a wider group of potential users.”

Sven, this is an oxymoron.
Lind is an industrial gas provider extending primary petrochemical source.
They’re tightly bond.
Also “sustainable mobility” is some kind of way of saying nothing at all and let everyone pick what it means.

Linde makes and engineers the H2 infrastructure and fueling equipment. It doesn’t care if the H2 is made from natural gas or from elctrolyzers powered with renewable energy. Linde’s ionic compressors and cryo pumps work with either sustainable hydrogen or fossil-fuel derived hydrogen.

The main players in building out the hydrogen fueling infrastructure are the large industrial gas companies, Linde Group, Liquid Air, and Iwatani. Other companies include H2 Logic, which manufactures H2 fueling stations, and ITM Power, which makes electrolyzers.

Well, not half as green as batteries. You get more than twice as much transportation for the same electricity if you cut your costs and go with the comparatively simple and cheap battery instead of the electrolyzer, compressors, space-tech tanks and complicated fuel cell.

And while the folly cell guys are setting up silly PR exercises, like a car-sharing system with 50 vehicles, battery tech is progressing rapidly:

A team at Stanford developed a cell with 30x the energy density of the currently leading Li-Ion cells used in cars (Teslas):

I’m not a chemist or a battery expert, so I don’t know what this really means for what batteries can be offered in the near future. Presumably it’s not yet clear what it means. But I do know this: We are nowhere near theoretical limits today, and plenty of possible ways to drastically increase energy density have been identified. The chances are pretty good that EVs with 1000 mile range can be made within a decade or two using battery packs that are much smaller, lighter and cheaper than today.

Fool cells are an absolutely ridiculously expensive and clumsy way to make a worse EV than batteries. It’s like those mechanical watches people pay house prices for. Hand-made and all. Sure, it’s an impressive piece of work, but it performs much worse than the radically simpler quartz watch which instead of ingenious mechanics relies on the natural frequency of a quartz crystal, leading to much more accurate time-keeping for a tiny fraction of the cost.

The main point with abandoning ICE is to use energy more efficiently and cut emissions (CO2 and particulates that cause local environmental pollution). Therefore the most important things to consider in any alternative solution is how energy-efficient it is and how much it reduces emissions.

These two in turn are really one and the same if we plan to use electricity. How much electricity we can produce from sun, wind, waves, geothermal and so on is of course completely independent of whether you use that electricity to make H2 or to charge a battery.

BEVs and FCEVs both store the energy chemically, but the former is 95% efficient to charge or discharge (90% round trip) whereas the other is 45% efficient to charge and 90% efficient to discharge (40% round trip).

Batteries plug in to the existing energy infrastructure called the grid with only a little electronics. Hydrogen requires a completely new network that alone is more costly than the *entire* electrical grid that we use for ALL purposes.

I really don’t understand how at this point anyone can think fuel cells deserve any other name than fool cells. Isn’t it obvious?!?

On contrary, I think they care a lot, because the price of making hydrogen varies much with the process.
I would be pretty happy that they make hydrogen “only” or mainly from waste of all kind using renewable, but that might not be the case, because I just don’t see it properly written, so the sustainable magic word uses.

In California and CARB states, by law, 33% of hydrogen used for transportation fuel must come from renewable sources. After a set number of kilograms are sold, the law automatically raises the minimum renewable percentage required for renewable hydrogen fuel. Currently, the hydrogen fuel sold in California is exceeding the minimum requirements with 46% coming from renewable sources.

Today, CARB proposed a strategy to reduce the impact of short-lived climate pollutants (SLCP). Methane is the most abundant of the SLCP in California. Nearly 60% of California’s methane emissions are produced by agricultural activities, primarily at dairy farms. California is the nation’s largest dairy state, home to 20% of US milk production. CARB’s Strategy calls for cutting manure methane emissions from dairies by 75% by 2030. One way to cut manure methane emissions is to convert it into hydrogen to be used for transportation. The strategy to reduce SLCP dovetails nicely with the requirement that hydrogen used for transportation contain a raising minimum amount of renewable hydrogen.

Some people have a keyword alert for Hydrogen and when it goes off they descend upon the alerted threads like a flying monkey brigade. One day the truth will come out about these hydrogen haters. Why doesn’t anyone ask whether Tesla fanatics are working for Ego Musk?

Don’t be upset, it’s not worth it. They attack anyting non tesla. Sometimes i think most commenters here would rather have a 25 year old diesel car over, say, a volt. That’s just how ludicrous these people really are.

Ok, let’s pretend batteries aren’t very quickly improving with respect to price per kWh, energy density and possibility of wireless charging – including on the go. Let’s say CCS was not already operative at 150 kW and not shortly releasing 300 kW.

Even if batteries couldn’t get any better than they are today, so that H2 would retain it’s ONLY advantage of quick refueling, I still don’t understand what you “hydrogen fans” see in the technology.

Can you inform me? Why would you like to see hydrogen cars happen?

Please don’t claim that they are green, because compared to battery cars, they certainly are not. Just like BEVs, FCEVs basically start with electricity. That’s a good thing, because it means cars sold today will pollute less tomorrow if we clean up our grid. Since cars live for nearly 20 years that is a very significant point.

But the problem is we don’t really stand a chance to get to 100% renewable sources for our electricity in this century. Even if you count nuclear as renewable (it isn’t, but it is CO2 free and next-gen reactor designs do seem to offer very substantial benefits), and even if nuclear was universally loved and faced no political obstacles, we’d still have to install a new reactor every week to get there.

In short, the only realistic assumption is we won’t have green energy for a long time still.

That in turn means that emissions from a BEV or an FCEV is simply a function of how much electricity it consumes. So energy efficiency is the key metric to evaluate the technologies.

How do they fare? Charging a battery is 95% efficient today, 97% before 2020. Making H2 was 45% efficient in 1920, is 45% efficient today and will still be 45% efficient in 2020.

So in terms of environmental impact, which is the main reason to abandon ICE even before we’ve burned all of the fossil fuels (something we shouldn’t actually do anyway, but that is another matter), BEVs utterly *demolish* fuel cell vehicles.

How about cost? First we’ll have to spend slightly over twice the energy to get the same amount of transportation if we opt for H2 rather than batteries. This means that the energy cost is more than twice as high every single year forever. Which adds up to a fairly big number. I’d agree this wouldn’t matter much if we had fusion power or some other way to give us a huge oversupply of green electricity. But, as already mentioned, that would be a crazy assumption at least any time in this century.

In addition there’s the cost of setting up the infrastructure in the first place. Again BEV is the clear winner, only this time it’s not by a factor of two but something more than ten.

All of this is when we compare what hydrogen might possibly become in the best of all theoretical worlds to battery tech as it’s offered in the shop TODAY. That is, the very best thing you could ever hope that hydrogen could ever become is much, MUCH worse than today’s battery tech with respect to the environmental impact and with respect to cost.

Against all of this it seems to me that “batteries are slower to charge” is a somewhat weak argument. Yes, they are slow to charge compared to filling up H2. But they are becoming much faster to charge almost by the day. And packs are getting bigger so we need to charge them less often. Most people can get by charging almost exclusively at home, where they’d be parked anyway. With wireless charging very likely to be a part of the picture within one decade EVs are really rather close to being far more convenient than ICE or H2, even with respect to “filling up”.